Quirky, irreverent and crackling with comic energy, “Survivor” must have seemed made-to-order to the editorial board of McSweeney’s, which published the Douglas Coupland short story in the summer of 2009. With scattershot references to Jonestown, nuclear annihilation, Jeffrey Dahmer, reality TV dregs and the Republic of Kiribati, the black-hearted story’s narrator (a self-pitying cameraman with an advanced case of cynicism) recounts his own ethically questionable strategies for tropical survival when a global meltdown interrupts the location shoot.

The enjoyably potty-mouthed protagonist’s wingman is Ray, “a screwed-by-life cameraman from Leeds.” Ray returns five years later as the titular cad and narrator of Worst. Person. Ever. Like his former boss, Ray’s also notably self-pitying, cynical and foul-mouthed. And yet with the exception of an early sentence in which a character decadently sprinkles cocaine on her caviar, his story stalls permanently: I didn’t titter, smile or guffaw at all for the duration of Ray’s tale (this sobriety from an easily amused reader who believes Melissa McCarthy in The Heat is hilarious, as is the spiteful misanthropic ranting narrator of Don Gillmor’s Mount Pleasant).

As though transfixed by and eager to mimic the relentless crude bits of calculated offensiveness in Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy and the juvenile but money-generating comic stylings of Adam Sandler, Coupland delivers broadly comic characters and a “wild and crazy” plot. Instead of laughter, however, he elicits frowns, annoyance and puzzlement. Worse, for a product being marketed as “a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value,” Worst. Person. Ever. is surprisingly dull.

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To begin, though, there’s Raymond, a middle-aged and practically unemployable loser who lusts after nubile beauties and dreads the many (many!) ball-busting women in his midst (most formidably his tacky mother and hostile former wife). By the third page Ray’s already hammered home the fact that Fi, his “leathery cumdump of an ex-wife,” is “a dreadful, dreadful, dreadful person. She is monstrous. She is the Anti-shag. She is an atomic bomb of pain. If you puncture her skin, a million baby spiders will explode from her body.” Near the end of the book he’s still listing her flaws. That schtick alone gets Tired. Really. Quickly.

In the novel Ray is a Londoner, but besides occasional Britishisms (wank, arse, crisps and so on), the characterization doesn’t recall the comic anti-heroes of Amis or McEwan or Lodge. He’s just a Coupland Character™ with a handful of British affectations: There’s the customary preoccupation with airports and nuclear annihilation (first appearing more than 20 years ago in Generation X), authorial asides in different typefaces (ditto), the deluge of popular trivia references (ditto) and the signature but knee-jerk pop-culture historicizing (a complexion “hadn’t been exposed to sunlight since the Spice Girls ruled the pop charts”; the place “had been maybe a hip and trendy waiting lounge back in the days of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 North American tour,” and so forth).

Ray’s barrage of joking at the expense of fat people, the poor, gays, the transgendered, women, and other races might be new to Coupland’s work, but in the age of MacFarlane and co., the material can’t make many claims of freshness.

The lurching and hyperactive plot traces Ray’s efforts to reach the middle-of-nowhere set after his ex-wife hires him as a B-unit cameraman on Survival, soon to shoot in Kiribati. Along the way, Ray’s assaulted, wounded, manhandled, insulted, hospitalized, incarcerated, interrogated, humiliated, insulted some more and faced with the twin indignities of sitting next to mentally challenged children and an obese guy on separate flights — all before arriving on the island.

Between the ever-building and incredible plot machinations (that culminate with the dropping of an atomic bomb), Ray generates mean thoughts about his mother and ex-wife and hatches plans for bedding nubile babes. While Coupland might be writing a satire about the infantilism of the contemporary heterosexual man-child (re: The Hangover and its siblings) or the absurdity of contemporary existence, the straining registers easily. The insight does not.

Ray’s last name is Gunt, by the way. If you’ve guess that Coupland chooses to leave out riffs on that set-up, you’re dead wrong.

Brett Josef Grubisic’s second novel, This Location of Unknown Possibilities, will be published next spring alongside Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature, an edited collection of scholarly essays.